State Department Clarifies Clinton Remark to Student

The State Department, a day after Hillary Clinton offered a terse response to a Congolese student’s question in Kinshasa, chalked up the episode to the man’s nerves, rather than a bad translation.

Clinton, on a visit to a Congo university Monday, was visibly irritated at the student who apparently asked the secretary of state during a town hall meeting for her husband Bill Clinton’s views on Congolese politics.

“My husband is not secretary of state, I am,” Clinton responded.

U.S. officials initially suggested that the man’s question had been mistranslated from French into English, and that he was really asking for President Barack Obama’s views.

But Tuesday, State Department officials reversed course and suggested that the man was nervous, and thus misspoke, rather than being misunderstood.

“I don’t think that we have a problem with the translation per se,” State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters in Washington, D.C. “The report that the student said, I meant to say Obama… I have no reason to doubt that version of events.”

Video footage of Clinton’s response has been circulated widely across the Internet, and has fed into the perception that the secretary of state is feeling marginalized inside the Obama administration.

Obama himself has taken the lead on a number of key foreign policy issues, such as Iran and Russia. And State Department special envoys engaged in Arab-Israeli peace talks and the Afghanistan war have taken over many of Washington’s other key foreign policy briefs.

The reemergence last week of Bill Clinton into the international limelight — on a mission to free two American journalists detained in North Korea — has also fed speculation that Secretary Clinton’s role is dwindling.

Crowley and other State Department officials Tuesday, however, debunked this view and chalked up Clinton’s reaction to her concern for women’s rights in Africa.

“It’s important to understand the context here: that, you know, one of — an abiding theme that she has in her trip to Africa is empowering women,” Crowley said. “As the question was posed to her, it was posed in a way that said: I want to get the views of two men, but not you, the secretary of state.”

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